Slashdot Mirror

Yeah - if you encounter a website not riddled with advertising, it's blistering how fast they can load. For example, this blog will load and display faster than any other website I've seen.

How come?

* Pre-processed server-side files
* Zero JavaScript
* Zero externally referenced files - the CSS is inline.
* Zero images

This all means that, despite it doing exactly NO client-side processing, because each page is around 5KB, the full reload on each page is still blindingly fast. Much much faster than anything in any javascript framework.

FIVE KILOBYTES. The whole page is SMALLER than most adverts!

Don't Distract New Programmers with OOP: http://prog21.dadgum.com/93.ht...

OOP Isn't a Fundamental Particle of Computing: http://prog21.dadgum.com/156.h...

My 10 yr old has had a few sparks of interest to try using the shell on her Linux box (she's only ever used Linux, except for occasional fiddling on my Surface Pro when we're out and about. She's nearly a Gimp expert, self-taught). I've given her some elementary shell command instruction and guidance, plus some tricks to play with hoping to inspire more curiosity. Now I'll be looking for reinforcing opportunities.

For ex. I had her install Rur-ple by following an instruction, that mostly spelled out what do in some places, but only described what to do in others (based on her prior experience having similar concepts spelled out and practiced a few times.)

In some cases she lurched past my perceptions of her understanding, and in others she stumbled where I thought she should get it.

My job, is to mostly listen and feed additional indirect help when asked. Also, to try very hard to understand what assumptions I take for granted that, absent in her mind, make certain concepts initially extremely non-obvious.

Young kids need to be stepped patiently through the most elementary concepts at times, and yet given room to play with concepts that they grasp and quickly sprout ideas from as to their interesting implications.

Most of all this requires a great deal of sincere kindness, empathy, and humility.

Most of what OOP is about is several levels too high in abstraction for young kinds to deal with. The linked articles explain it well enough.

A language like Python, while being OOP by design, doesn't force one to deal with OOP program design if they don't want. In Java this is not so.

Don't Distract New Programmers with OOP: http://prog21.dadgum.com/93.ht...

OOP Isn't a Fundamental Particle of Computing: http://prog21.dadgum.com/156.h...

My 10 yr old has had a few sparks of interest to try using the shell on her Linux box (she's only ever used Linux, except for occasional fiddling on my Surface Pro when we're out and about. She's nearly a Gimp expert, self-taught). I've given her some elementary shell command instruction and guidance, plus some tricks to play with hoping to inspire more curiosity. Now I'll be looking for reinforcing opportunities.

For ex. I had her install Rur-ple by following an instruction, that mostly spelled out what do in some places, but only described what to do in others (based on her prior experience having similar concepts spelled out and practiced a few times.)

In some cases she lurched past my perceptions of her understanding, and in others she stumbled where I thought she should get it.

My job, is to mostly listen and feed additional indirect help when asked. Also, to try very hard to understand what assumptions I take for granted that, absent in her mind, make certain concepts initially extremely non-obvious.

Young kids need to be stepped patiently through the most elementary concepts at times, and yet given room to play with concepts that they grasp and quickly sprout ideas from as to their interesting implications.

Most of all this requires a great deal of sincere kindness, empathy, and humility.

Most of what OOP is about is several levels too high in abstraction for young kinds to deal with. The linked articles explain it well enough.

A language like Python, while being OOP by design, doesn't force one to deal with OOP program design if they don't want. In Java this is not so.

Then I suggest every programmer read every single one of the posts on this site: http://prog21.dadgum.com/ . The author has a remarkably clear head about things and a very mature outlook on programming.

Have fun designing programs that manipulate massive amounts of state with functional programming style. Given that nobody has figured out how to do a first person shooter with a functional langauge, makes me suspect that they aren't the one answer to every problem. In fact even a relatively simple game is quite awkward in a functional style.

I guess you can't solve every problem with lambda calculus and retain your sanity.

Excerpt from an interview with the author, Marc Goodman at http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/GOODMAN.HTM

The game seemed popular and received great reviews. Did it do well commercially?

Nope. Datamost only sold around 5,000 copies of the game. I've gotten email from a lot of people and even met people who know and love the game and you know what? I've never met or talked to anyone who had an official copy.

Pretty frequently I see the recurring threads on software piracy on various newsgroups. People really believe that there is no impact from their copying software. Well, there is an impact. I couldn't support myself by writing computer games, so "The Bilestoad" was the last game I did.

Is anyone else struck by the hypocrisy in this article? Another excerpt from the same interview:

My senior year of high school, I put together a pretty straightforward version of "Asteroids." I was living in Florida at this point, and a friend of mine who worked at the local computer store would drive over to central Florida to pick up software from Scott Adams' company Adventure International. The summer of my senior year, I tagged along on one of these trips and gave Scott a demo of my game. He liked it, and we ended up signing a contract. The game was released as "Asteroid" at first, and later, when Atari started to get on our case about it, the name was changed to "Planetoids." It hit the market in 1980 and was reasonably successful. It was on Softalk's best seller list for several months, was reviewed in Byte magazine's "Coinless Arcade," and so on.

Excerpt from an interview with the author, Marc Goodman at http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/GOODMAN.HTM

The game seemed popular and received great reviews. Did it do well commercially?

Nope. Datamost only sold around 5,000 copies of the game. I've gotten email from a lot of people and even met people who know and love the game and you know what? I've never met or talked to anyone who had an official copy.

Pretty frequently I see the recurring threads on software piracy on various newsgroups. People really believe that there is no impact from their copying software. Well, there is an impact. I couldn't support myself by writing computer games, so "The Bilestoad" was the last game I did.

In entirely subjective terms, a game creator could be politically and philosophically against the use and misuse of his game by the army or some political party or ideology. Creating a game about real world or imaginary conflicts could be both a critique or a propaganda of a specific ideology ( and no, I don't believe them when they say that their game "has no political point of view, really!", nothing is unbiased).

See for example the case of Ed Rotberg and the "battlezone bradley training".

It's nothing not unheard on other mediums, but the lack of strong authorship on videogames makes the problem somewhat worse.A writer could usually dissociate from intepretation given to his own texts by some others, without depriving the opportunity of reinterpret the original work. A videogame writer / game designer usually has to censor himself, or is forced to follow the positions expressed by their producers and publishers.

Things have changed a lot since the old Amiga days. The video game business has become a field where billions are being earned, and that's no longer a secret to investors. Things were different in the eighties when investing in video games was considered taking a high risk. (It still is, but not to the degree it was back then.) To learn a bit about how thing work today, follow these hints: 1.) Try to trace the path the Yerli brothers of Crytek went with their X-Isle demo. I think they made just about 100% right in getting the support they needed. But keep in mind that they were very clever from the beginning, which was essential to their success. 2.) To learn more about publishers and their evil ways, read the following interview with legendary game developer Archer Maclean: http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/MACLEAN.HTM Furthermore, the case of Maclean and his brilliant game Mercury may also serve as an illustration of how the definition of what a good idea is may change a lot with a change of perspective. Mercury was the perfect game for all purists (like me), but it didn't sell very well. After Maclean had left, Ignition (his publisher) released a follow-up 'Mercury Meltdown', which was a commercial exploit of Maclean's ideas. And it worked. (I still like the original better, but the masses don't agree with me.)

Here is some more info.

http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/NEUBAUER.HTM

I sw this on an Atari 400 in 1980. After that I got an 800XL, I stopped dropping quarters for good then.

article here

The author, Marc Goodman, supposedly was working on an updated version of Bilestoad for MacOS (link) but it seems like the project got put on hold, perhaps.

An article previously mentioned on Slashdot.

Yeah, as long as you write simple, 2D games(like the author of the essay does) that would be true. Complex, 3D games are another matter. I write games for a living and even if you're within sight of cutting edge you're writing at least some assembly and spending a lot of time optimizing C++.

Now I'm not knocking all he says or saying that good games need to be in C++ and assembly. Some games rely heavily on scripting languages to handle the game mechanics and world events. There's a lot less assembly code than there used to be. However, the core engine that handles graphics, physics, AI, and I/O is going to be written in C++ and assembly and will be for the forseeable future.

If I published a game that required a 3Ghz computer to display 576x576 images at 66fps, I'd be laughed off the internet. A PS2 has a 300Mhz processor and needs to display a 512x448 image every 30-60 seconds.

Sure you're not thinking of Marc Goodman's Bilestoad?

BTW: Bilestoad rocked.

Also see Minter's entry in this list.

It is amusing that the obsession with raw speed never goes away, even though computers have gotten thousands of times faster since the the days of the original wisdom about how one shouldn't be obsessed with speed. Programmers put down Visual Basic as slow when it was an interpreted language running on a 66MHz 486. It was still put down as slow when it shared the same machine code generating back-end as Visual C++ running on a 3GHz Pentium 4. And still some people--usually people with little commercial experience--continue to insist that speed is everything.

Here's a bombshell: if you have a nice language, and that language doesn't have any hugely glaring drawbacks (such as simple benchmarks filling up hundreds of megabytes of memory), then don't worry about speed. From past experience, I've found it's usually easy to start with what someone considers to be a fast C or C++ program. Then I write a naive version in Python or another language I like. And guess what? My version will be 100x slower. Sometimes this is irrelevant. 100x slower than a couple of microseconds doesn't matter. Other times it does matter. But it usually isn't important to be anywhere near as fast as C, just to speed up the simpler, cleaner Python version by 2-20x. This can usually be done by fiddling around a bit, using a little finesse, trying different approaches. It's all very easy to do, and one of the great secrets is that high-level optimization is a lot of fun and more rewarding than assembly level optimization, because the rewards are so much greater.

This is mostly undiscovered territory, but I found one interesting link.

Note that I'm not talking about diddly high-level tasks in language like Python, but even things like image processing. It doesn't matter. Sticking to C and C++ for performance reasons, even though you know there are better languages out there, is a backward way of thinking.

Scroll down this page for details:

Odyssey II page

From this, I'd say that Sega may have a case, provided they really can demonstrate that there is no prior art.

However, I'm hoping they don't get the game removed from shelves. That's what happened with K. C. Munchkin fortunately after I had already purchased it.

Or look at Halycon Days which has interviews with many of the early video game programmers (8 bits of raw power!)

- The game Tempest was inspired by a nightmare Jeff Minter had about monsters that'd crawl out of a hole in the ground.


Close, but not quite.

Jeff Minter was not the original programmer for Tempest, it was Dave Theurer (KLOV - Tempest)

Jeff Minter DID do the Atari Jaguar Tempest 2000 game however. (Jeff Minter

Jeff "Yak" Minter is probably better known for his "Revenge of the Mutant Camels" and "Llamatron".

What's the story behind the U.S. Army version of "Battlezone"?
There was a group of consultants for the Army--a bunch of retired generals and such--that approached Atari with the idea that the technology for "Battlezone" could be used to make a training simulator for the then new Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The idea was that such a simulator could be made into a game that would encourage the soldiers to use it. They would learn not only the basic operation of the IFV technology, but would also learn to distinguish between the friendly and enemy vehicle silhouettes.
They approached us with this in December of 1980 and found a champion in the company in Rick Moncrief. They wanted a prototype to be finished in time for a worldwide TRADOC conference, being held via satellite, in March 1981.
and more...visit the site

right here.

Also Dan Bunten / Danielle Berry, who authored the old 8-bit game M.U.L.E.

The demise of the legendary AR series was much more of a loss to me (and many other fanatic players, I presume). Only 2 out of 7(?) parts were released and judging from Philip Price's obvious talents, all 7 would have been worthwhile. There was an attempt around 1995 to develop "Alternate Reality Online" (www.aro.com, now defunct) by Philip Price and Gary Gilbertson (the 2 people responsible for the first AR game, AFAIK), but apparently it never went far.

If you liked the Bilestoad, you can read a interview with its creator, Mark Goodman. You used to be able to find his recent efforts to re-create the game for modern Macs here, but it appears to go to his company webpage now.

I think the most telling quote in his interview is this one:


"Pretty frequently I see the recurring threads on software piracy on various newsgroups. People really believe that there is no impact from their copying software. Well, there is an impact. I couldn't support myself by writing computer games, so "The Bilestoad" was the last game I did."

Halcyon Days. This used to be commercial a few years back.

My advice is to make the effort and go to H2K2 and get a real sample. I think you will find like I did when I spoke at H2K, that the majority are well informed about our history.

Like any culture, our culture needs to be taught! Only so many can have had first hand experience and there are less of us each day. Yet, each day, there are more just coming into interest who need to be taught. If you find such a teacherless group of people interested in computers, you should take it upon yourself to teach who we are.

Show people the first computer you ever programmed. Show them the games you played and wrote. Show them how to say "Hello World!" directly with a Turing Machine or in Java and everything between.

Tell them about Norbert Wiener and Marie Ampere. Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush. Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and David Levy (yes Ken Thompson too and Belle). Scott Adams(all three) and Stanislaw Lem. Joeseph Weizenbaum and Eliza, Alaxander Bain and Donald Hebb. Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney and Larry Bryan. Alan Kay and Steve Russell. David Gottieb, Joel Hochberg and Al Arcorn. Thomas Hobbes and Levithan. Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Huxley. Aristotle and Lucretius. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Charles Babbage and Blaise Pascal. B. F. Skinner and Wilhelm Wundt. Robert Tinney and Peter Max. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky. Doug Lenat, Push Singh and myself.

We will always need more teachers who know how to both show and to tell!

A number of the people from the video game section of the book, including John Harris, were interviews for a book that came out a few years ago. John Harris, who was a primary player in the original book, talks about how Levy twisted details around and made him look in a much poorer light. Some of the other video game programmers from Hackers are included as well. Good stuff, if you like detailed interviews with programmers and game designers.

read "Halcyon Days", which features interviews with some of the wizards of those days, like John Harris, Warren Schwader, and Bill Budge (Harris and Schwader are feature players in "Hackers").

I first saw this work referenced on Slashdot the last time this book was reviewed. It's a good companion to "Hackers", especially the John Harris interview.

What happened to those 80's game designers, anyway?

Look here.

Heck, back in the early 1980s you'd see kids pictured on the front of magazines for writing computer games and making boatloads of money (Mark Turmell, John Harris, Greg Christensen, etc). And remember whiz kids like Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, Dell, and Torvalds? These days, you see kids on the cover of Wired for starting nebulous web-based businesses. You don't see teenagers making a fortune in games any more, because big business has moved into that field. Similarly, big business has moved heavily on the web.

BTW, there are interviews with some of those game-geeks of yesteryear over here. Ah, memories...

One of the very first self-published books I ran across on the web was Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers. It was released back in 1997. I remember reading about it in a number of places, including Wired. It might be worthwhile to talk to the author and see how it turned out.

Maybe there are other examples of this kind?

This is a good read.

The first electronic book I ran across was Halcyon Days, back in 1997. It comes as a bundle of HTML files, but still gets sent out on diskette (which is cute in a retro sorta way :)

This touches on the overwhelming failure of indie game developers.

This has links to some good articles about the future of gaming and the rise and fall of shareware and hobbyist game programming.

This touches on the overwhelming failure of indie game developers.

This has links to some good articles about the future of gaming and the rise and fall of shareware and hobbyist game programming.

A damn good read, IMO.